I’m Jarrett Kaufman for HPPR.
The book in review is Nicholas Lamar Soutter’s The Water Thief. The novel was published in 2012 and was awarded the Clarion Foreword Science Fiction Book of the Year and the Kirkus Star.
The Water Thief is a dystopian work of “mundane science fiction.” In 2004, Geoff Ryman and other Clarion West Workshop Instructors, published the infamous “The Mundane Science Fiction Manifesto,” that states:
| The movement proposes "mundane science fiction" as its own subgenre science fiction, typically characterized by its setting on Earth and a believable use of technology and science as it exists at the time the story is written or a plausible extension of existing technology. |
Charles Thatcher exists in a world where corporations control all aspects of public and private life. Democratically elected officials are relics of the past. Police officers and firefighters are not public servants but employees of a now privatized entities. Even citizenship doesn’t exist. Thatcher, like most others, is “a private citizen,” which means, more or less, that he’s the private property of a corporation.
He works in the Perception Management Division for the Ackerman Brothers Securities Corporation. His responsibilities are to spin and shape any information damaging or harmful to Ackerman. He says:
| I dealt with unfavorable press, ratings, or reviews. In the morning, I would pick up whatever literature I could, then spend the day scouring it and writing reports, which I would send to the ninth floor for further review. I earned a commission on any report that made or saved the firm money. |
Thatcher, a mid-level employee, spends much of his time navigating his way through a corporate totalitarian society where everything is commodified: Elevator rides, friendships, marriages, secrets, air, and water. Everything in this world is for sale.
When Thatcher learns a woman is stealing rainwater, he reports her as a seditionist. Based on career advice from his higher-ranking colleague, Linus, he hopes that this story, if received well by corporate, might improve his odds at becoming an executive. However, once he discovers the woman is rich and chooses to live in a poor district, he questions the principles of a hyper-capitalistic society. He reflects:
| We aren’t workers: we’re fuel—fuel for a large machine that wants nothing more than to consume us for the lowest possible cost. I’ve been dying for a very, very long time, and I’m sick of it. |
Later, Thatcher finds out the water thief vanished, and he embarks on a dangerous journey to uncover what happened. His efforts to locate the woman upend his life and soon Employee Retention (a division of Ackerman that employs blackmail, murder, and extortion) detains him. However, in a world where profit is God, they—after draining his bank account—allow him to escape, for it only creative more opportunities to make money.
Now on the lam, Thatcher joins a group of revolutionaries who teach him about the history of governments and the principles of democracy, long ago outlawed. He wants to aid the rebels and their mission to destroy the corporatism that controls the world but when he and the rebels think they can fail the economy, Thacker learns the problems of this world are much more complicated. They would have to change the way people perceive themselves and the way they perceive the world. Thatcher, himself a former propagandist, knows people are capable of believing things they know are not true.
What is to be done then? George Orwell argues “power is tearing human minds into pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing,” and the social order that follows “is a swindle and its cherished beliefs mostly delusions.”
Does this mean that all power is corrupting regardless of intention? If so, will Thatcher and his rebel friends merely establish another state that itself deceives and subjugates like the one before it?
I’m Jarrett Kaufman for HPPR.
